Danny Duchamp

Against Moral Nihilism

2021-07-26T03:29:00.000-07:00

Against Moral Nihilism

Video version of this article here: https://youtu.be/OExAQkmBBkU

Consequentialist: Whether an action is good or evil depends only on the consequences of that action.

Deontologist: Not true. Sometimes bad actions can have good results, or vice versa. For example, should a doctor kill one healthy patient, cut his organs out, and redistribute them to the five sick dying patients who would be saved by those organs? Obviously not. This would have good results on net—four lives saved! But it's still murder, and therefore evil, so morality isn't determined by consequences.

Consequentialist: That action may not have good results. You're leaving out the possibility that I'll be caught and the damage that will do to trust in the medical profession. You're leaving out the chance that I will screw up one or more of the requisite surgeries resulting in more death. You're leaving out the question of how many years of life the healthy patient would have had compared to how many years of life the sick patients will get on their stolen organs—not to mention quality of life.

Deontologist: You're just fighting the hypothetical. Assume that all of those risks are negligible and their lives are otherwise identical.

Consequentialist: Now you're making the hypothetical totally implausible and therefore unintuitive, which is a problem because your argument relies on my moral intuition that the doctor did something wrong. Of course my moral intuition will give me the wrong answer when you ask me to assume away factors that are too obviously important to ignore. But there is a famous hypothetical that resolves this—the trolley problem. There's a trolley hurtling down some train train tracks. There are five people tied to the tracks in front of it. You can pull a lever that diverts it down another track where only one person is tied up, however then you will have caused one persons death, rather than simply failing to prevent the deaths of five. Now that we have a situation where the obvious and intuitive risks are absent in the hypothetical (rather than present, but supposed to be assumed away) it becomes obvious what the right choice is: pull the lever for consequentialism.

Deontologist: I don't agree that the answer in that situation is so obvious. I don't actually think you should pull the lever.

Consequentialist: All I need to do is raise the stakes. Let's say that instead of five people tied to the tracks ahead there is a button on the tracks ahead. When the trolley runs over this button everyone on earth except the person tied to the alternate track will be killed.

Deontologist: Now whose hypothetical is becoming contrived and unintuitive? In any case, I still don't think the answer is so clear.

Consequentialist: I can't believe you're actually thinking about biting the bullet on this one. Basically nobody would say that you should accept the extinction of humanity in order to follow some contrived ethical maxim.

Deontologist: I don't know about that. Let's ask that guy over there, hey buddy, what do you think?

Nihilist: Your prattle amuses me. Good? Evil? These are meaningless constructs that humans bicker about incessantly, never willing to consider the obvious truth: there is no morality. ["Crawling" by Linkin Park begins to play in the background] The universe is cold and indifferent to your meaningless gibbering about what "ought" to be. There is only what is in this vast and uncaring world. Reason will not save you from the blunt impact of reality. It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger!

What Is Moral Nihilism?

A moral nihilist is someone who sees morality as a silly superstition. Someone who thinks that ultimately nothing is really right or wrong. When the moral nihilist hears two people arguing, one trying to convince the other that some act is "morally wrong", he scoffs.

Sometimes the scoffing will come along with a caveat that morality may be useful in some sense, but that there is still something fundamentally irrational about it. At the extremely moderate end, a moral nihilist may even say that while moral nihilism is technically true, he acts as though morality were real.

I'm going to argue against this view. There is a real aspect of reality that conforms to our intuitive concept of "morality" so well that it would be absurd if we did not call it "morality".

First, I'm going to broaden my attack. I want to make sure I'm responding to all moral nihilists, even the moral nihilists who don't know they're moral nihilists. If you would describe your opinion of morality as "might makes right", you are also a moral nihilist. If, when confronted with a question of morality, you simply brush it off with "morality is subjective", you are also also a moral nihilist.

I am now telling people what they are, which people tend not to like, so I had better justify myself quickly.

Might Makes Right

To be fair, this statement is sometimes used for purposes other than moral nihilism. Sometimes it's meant to make the point that whatever your idea of morality is, it's pretty inconsequential if you don't have the power to enforce it. If you're using it this way, make sure you're not using it to respond to a moral claim. If I say "I think this thing is immoral" and you chortle and say "the only morality is might makes right. The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." then despite how cool you think that makes you sound, it's off topic. You may be correct (my understanding of morality may be impotent if I'm without might) but that says nothing about whether or not an act is in fact moral.

But this is all with respect to a non-literal interpretation which doesn't actually make a direct statement about morality at all. If we instead interpret the statement "might makes right" literally, then it actually carries an implication of moral nihilism. Taken literally, the claim "might makes right" means that whatever the mighty do is necessarily right. Presumably might in this context is not just physical strength, but whatever ability you use to manifest your will in reality. Intelligence is a kind of "might", popularity is a kind of "might", and so on.

By this definition nothing can be done that is not an example of might prevailing. If anything happens that you didn't want to happen then you were not the one with the might, and so "what the mighty determine" is indistinguishable from "what happens". Instead of "might makes right" you may as well just say "whatever happens is right".

Furthermore, if might really is right then nothing can ever happen that is not right either. If everything that happens is necessarily right, then "right" (in a moral sense) is also indistinguishable from "what happens".

If you enter a discussion of morality and you effectively say "what happens is what happens", you're either failing to make a relevant comment, or you're trying to say that you don't believe in morality at all. Therefore, to the extent that it's even relevant to a conversation about morality, the statement "might makes right" is just a way of saying "there is no right" that manages to sound even more like teenage angst.

Morality Is Subjective

This is another way that people try to say that they don't believe in morality without actually saying it.

First of all, I want to get this out of the way because it's bafflingly common. Whether morality is subjective has nothing to do with whether we disagree on it. Often people will say "this one guy, or this one culture considers this act to be immoral, while this other guy, or this other culture considers it to be perfectly fine, so morality is really subjective." That doesn't logically follow at all. Cultures and individuals disagree on scientific claims as well. Not all cultures realized the earth was round, but that didn't make the shape of the earth "subjective". It's still objective, it's just disputed.

"Subjective" means relating to a specific person or "subject". For example, let's take the statement "steak is delicious". The most common definition of the word "delicious" is basically equivalent to saying that you personally like the taste. In that sense, deliciousness is subjective. If I say "steak is delicious", it's true. When people who don't like steak (communists probably) make that same statement then it is false. Perhaps there would be some other implied subject for deliciousness to apply to in different contexts. Perhaps a chef might mean that the average person who he's likely to serve likes steak. The point is that "deliciousness" can be described as "subjective" because it describes not an aspect of the thing itself, but rather something that happens in a subject's mind in response to that thing.

This is in contrast to a term which is objective, which describes something about the object in question rather than how in interacts with a subject. For example, "squareness" is an objective property. If we're both looking at a shape which has four equal sides and four equal angles, then it doesn't matter who says it's a square, it simply is one.

As you might have noticed, this is a purely linguistic distinction. So, to say that morality is subjective only says something about the word. Not that that's unimportant. We need to understand words. So, what would it mean for "morality" to be subjective in the same way that "deliciousness" is?

It would mean that "morality" simply describes a reaction we have to something, rather than the thing itself. To say something is immoral in this sense is to say that it offends our moral sensibilities. We see someone drop kick a baby, we feel a bad feeling. Not just any bad feeling, mind you, (this is not the idea that immorality is just when we dislike something) but a specific bad feeling—the feeling of being morally offended.

We can all intuitively distinguish between different kinds of bad feelings. When we see someone eat something off the floor we feel disgust, when we see a dangerous animal we feel fear. We have no problem telling the difference between the feelings.

Similarly, you probably have no problem distinguishing the feeling you had when I mentioned someone drop-kicking a baby. I mean, this is being written for the internet so I bet some of you laughed, but you probably still feel at least a little of the negative feeling called "moral offense"—which you can tell is different from other negative feelings like disgust and fear.

But hold on, aren't I supposed to be arguing that moral subjectivism is moral nihilism? So far it sounds like our subjectivist believes that morality is as real as deliciousness and scariness. In what sense is that moral nihilism?

Well, when two people are having a moral argument, they're trying to convince one another through arguments. Appeals to consequences and principles that are supposed to convince their interlocutors that what they thought was moral was in fact immoral (or vice versa).

This would make no sense for deliciousness. I wouldn't try to tell you that the meal you thought you enjoyed eating, which you thought was delicious, actually tasted bad and you didn't enjoy it at all. This is because your direct experience is the only determining factor that decides whether something is, to you, delicious.

For moral arguments to make sense there must be something other than our subjective experience that we're talking about. If you're saying that morality is purely subjective, you're saying is that there is no external aspect of the world which we are referring to when we talking about morality. So the moral subjectivist is a moral nihilist; at least with respect to the kind of morality we refer to when making moral arguments.

Refuting Moral Nihilism

Having corralled "might makes right", moral subjectivism and explicit moral nihilism into the same spot, I can now take out all three in one fell swoop.

In step one I point out that moral nihilists do things.

Not only do they do things, but they do things for reasons.

That is to say, they have things which they value more highly than other things and they take actions which they believe will result in a net gain in the fulfillment of those values. For example, they value eating a sandwich more highly than they value being lazy and sitting on the couch, so they make the trade. They expend the time and effort and get the sandwich to eat.

In step two I concede to moral nihilism completely. A bold strategy when arguing against something, but actually it's surprisingly effective against a lot of hard-to-analyze positions.

That's right nihilists, there is no morality. Your hard-nosed realism has won out against us silly romantics who believe in ethics[1]. Now we're ready for step three: analyze the situations we used to apply morality to, without such foolish superstitions.

How would a nihilist doctor decide whether to steal the organs from a healthy man in order to save the lives of five dying patients? Of course he'd just go with his preferences—as we discussed before, despite being a moral nihilist, he still personally values some things above others. So, it depends on preferences such as whether he would rather one person to die or five.

It might sound obvious which he'd prefer, but there's no reason to prefer fewer people dying to more. As the rational, realistic nihilists we now are, we know that reason can not tell us what to value. After all, it is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger[2]. That being said, do you prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of your finger? I don't think that I do. I also would prefer, all else equal, for my actions to cause fewer people to die rather than more. So, maybe I would kill the man and redistribute his organs.

Then again, I would also prefer, all else equal, to not be caught killing people. Not just for my own sake, but if I damaged the reputation of the medical profession (or even just my own reputation as a doctor) and as a result people didn't get medical treatment that they needed, I would feel really bad about that.

Also, let's not forget that I might screw up the surgeries. I'd really rather not have the whole lot of them die on me. That's also ignoring the question of how many years of life the healthy patient would have had compared to how many years of life the sick patients will get on their stolen organs—not to mention quality of life.

That's right, quality of life. I would personally prefer that people have better lives rather than worse ones (all else equal). In fact, that's kind of the reason I would prefer people to not die in the first place. If people die then I feel like their quality of life has effectively dropped to zero.

But how to weigh up the quality of life brought on by a longer life against the quality of life from not having painful surgery complications? More pressingly, how to weigh up any of these benefits interpersonally? A year to one man is not necessarily the same as a year to another.

The question of how to compare values interpersonally—to weigh up the values of one man against the values of another—is a tough one. It isn't entirely unanswerable though. We seem to manage interpersonal value judgements all the time. If I have a spare concert ticket to give to one of my friends, I will probably give it to the one who likes the band more. That is an interpersonal value comparison and it seems to make intuitive sense.

There are more questions I could ask, but let's pause and take stock of what we've got so far. You might have noticed that all of these questions come from the same source: the fact that one of the things I value is the fulfillment of values. If I imagine a world in which more people have their values fulfilled vs one in which fewer people do, then all else equal, I prefer the former.

This is sounding dangerously like consequentialism, but of course, I have conceded nihilism, so it can't possibly be that. This is all just based on my own personal values, not on morality... right?

Besides, when I think about what might happen if everyone acted on that simple value fulfillment maximizing basis, it doesn't sound too good. Imagine that every time you went to the doctor there was the danger that he'd kill you and cut out your organs. I don't think too many people would go to the doctor, and paradoxically, that would result in fewer values being fulfilled. Now, I'm not "everyone" so me acting on a simple value-maximization basis like that isn't necessarily going to result in that awful world I'm worried about... but I would be contributing to such a world, and I'm not sure I even want to do that. I suppose what I really want to do is to act in a way such that I'm contributing to a world in which values are maximally fulfilled.

This is sounding dangerously like deontology, but of course, I have conceded nihilism so it's can't possibly be that. This is all just based on my own personal values, not on morality...

But hold a second, what exactly is morality? Because the reasoning I'm doing here sounds a heck of a lot like it. The reasoning is not broadly about how to fulfil my values, but specifically about how to fulfil those values that pertain to the fulfillment of values. One might call that the analysis of the fulfillment meta-values. It does start from my subjective preferences, but it's an objective fact that some actions I take will fulfill these meta-values more effectively than others.

What if we were to define morality as "the analysis of the fulfillment of meta-values"? We've already seen that both deontology and consequentialism fit nicely with that definition, and most moral theories can be thought of as variants of one of those two. Perhaps the most prominent exceptions are theological theories of ethics, so what about those? Well, those determine good and bad based on what God wants. Or in other words, the fulfillment of God's values. My definition appears to handle that too.

An obvious criticism at this point is that I'm just redefining morality in order to be able to say it's real and objective. But am I redefining morality?

I don't think so.

Merriam-Webster defines morality in a number of ways, but all of them pass the buck to another word. For example: "Conformity to ideals of right human conduct."

This just passes the buck to "right". What does "right" mean in this context? Well, "right and wrong" need to be defined in terms of a goal. There is an objectively right and wrong way to build a table... assuming that the goal is to have a table which succeeds in standing up. But in a moral argument, "building a table which stands up" is probably not the assumed goal by which we are judging right and wrong. If I said "your action is immoral because it does not result in a table which stands up", you would probably say that it is bad carpentry, but is not necessarily bad morally. On the other hand, if I said "your action is immoral because it prevents people from fulfilling their values" then that might sound a bit more sensible.

That is my conception of morality: The analysis of the fulfillment of meta-values.

Taking Morality for a Test Drive

This might sound like it's wheeling its way back to moral subjectivism. If we all have different meta-values, then surely what is moral to me will depend on my meta-values, what's moral to you will depend on yours, and these will surely differ.

There's some truth to this argument. Like all concepts there are aspects of subjectivity and objectivity involved. However, I have three counter-points:

My conception of morality is the analysis of how to fulfill meta-values, not simply the meta-values themselves. Your meta-values may be subjective but it is an objective fact whether a given course of action will or will not successfully fulfill them. For example, you may value your friend fulfilling his values. That is a meta-value. If your friend likes beer and hates getting stabbed in the neck it would be moral for you to get him a beer and immoral for you to stab him in the neck.

There are commonalities between values of people. Therefore the same objective analysis of how to fulfill these values will often be the same between people.

Most importantly, there are important objective statements we can make about the fulfillment of values irrespective of what those values are.

In the example for this third point will be taking our new morality for a test drive to see if it can produce moral standards that we recognize as such. My favorite moral standard comes from our good old friend voluntarism. A concept which I will never tire of repeating until everyone starts realizing how indispensable it is. If two people voluntarily engage in an interaction, each person must value what he got out of the interaction more than what he gave up to engage in it—otherwise he would not have engaged in it.[3] If you trade your apple for my orange you must value my orange more than your apple. If you play a game with me you must value the enjoyment you get from the game more than the time you give up to play it. This tells us that to the extent that we place a positive value on people fulfilling their values, we have some reason to expect voluntary interactions to be good—no matter what those values are.

We just derived something that sounds suspiciously like a moral principle starting from simple and obvious premises. That's a big deal when trying to refute moral nihilism, so let's run through it again.

If you care about the fulfillment of people's values (which is to say, if you have meta-values) then you have some reason to favor voluntary interactions.

You objectively do care about the fulfillment of people's values (wh.

Therefore:

You have some reason to favor voluntary interactions.

We have established a moral principle and it is objectively true that you should use it, given goals which you actually have. It is only a general principle. I have only said that you have some reason to favor voluntary interactions, not that all interactions must be voluntary. But general principles are still very useful. If a general principle is sound then you should go with it unless the reasons to do otherwise outweigh the reasons behind the principle. Perhaps there are other principles which will outweigh our voluntarist principle in certain situations, but the voluntarist principle still provides an objectively right and wrong way to act in the absence of other reasoning.

Let's apply our moral principle to the hypothetical from earlier. Should you harvest the organs from the one healthy patient to save the sick patients? Well, according to our general voluntarist principle, no. The healthy patient does not agree to it, and so it is not voluntary. Unless and until we have a countervailing principle, you have an answer to the question. You have meta-values. A general principle which helps you fulfil those meta-values is the voluntarist principle. Killing the healthy patient for his organs violates the voluntarist principle. Therefore you should not kill him. Perhaps you would argue that whether someone agrees to things is not the only way we can determine what people value, and so there is some other countervailing principle that would tell us that in fact we should butcher the innocent man. I will not comment on whether you are right about that, because by making that argument you're already conceding that there is an objectively correct way of achieving the goal of fulfilling meta-values. That is to say that by our working definition of morality there is an objectively moral course of action. You are just disagreeing on what that course of action is.

So, after our test-drive, what do you think? Morality as the analysis of how to fulfill meta-values seems to handle pretty well on the road, no?

I have found that at this point, skeptics of this model of morality will usually assert that this doesn't count as morality, even though this model allows us to engage in all the arguments people usually call moral arguments, and even produces principles that sound indistinguishable from moral principles. Sometimes they'll say "it's not morality because it doesn't give a reason that you ought to be moral". Except it does. Once again, "ought" must be in reference to a given goal ("You ought to do x to achieve y"). You do have the goal of fulfilling people's values. That is a reason you ought to analyze how to fulfill people's values. To me it seems that some people just feel like it doesn't count as morality as soon as you define it to clearly. Unfortunately for those people, facts don't care about your feelings.

Another critique is that my conception of morality is redundant because it simply describes fulfilling your own values, and we already have a way of describing that. But that's not what my conception of morality is. My conception of morality is the methodology for fulfilling a specific subcategory of our values. Specifically, values which pertain to other values. Carpentry is also about a methodology for fulfilling a subcategory of our values, specifically values which can be fulfilled by wooden furniture. Good carpentry is a good methodology for producing (among other things) tables which stand up, because those are the kinds of tables we value. Good morality is a good methodology for fulfilling meta-values, because we do in fact hold meta-values. If my conception of morality is redundant, then so is our conception of carpentry.

It's also worth clarifying that my conception of morality does not necessarily advocate self-sacrifice. You are interested in other people fulfilling their values, but you are also interested in fulfilling your own. A good meta-value analysis will include your own values as well. A good way to illustrate this is to point out that a man who does nothing to help or hurt anyone else, but does make himself happy, is a good man.

Conclusion

This does not mean that morality must necessarily be defined in terms of the fulfillment of meta-values. Please don't go away from this article thinking that I think I've just solved morality—I am aware that I have not. Perhaps there is some other valid conception of morality which is not defined by meta-values at all. After all, definitions are always imperfect simplifications of the intuitions and associations that a word actually provokes in people's minds. However, the fact that my definition seems to work seamlessly in every argument about the morality of any given action, it's hard to argue that it's not a valid conception of morality.

That is all that is necessary to refute moral nihilism—one valid conception of morality which is objectively determinable and provides a prescriptive "ought" for you to fulfill. You objectively do hold some meta-values and there are objectively right and wrong ways to fulfill these meta-values. Therefore, morality is a real thing that you should consider in your life; and even if you're a moral nihilist, you undoubtedly already do.

[1]

Yes, I use "morality" and "ethics" interchangeably. I'll leave the question of whether that turns my writing into incomprehensible gobbledygook up to you.

[2]

...To quote a man who, curiously, was not a nihilist.

[3]

Yes, this does assume some level of rational self-interest. However, this assumption usually sound. Consider a man who feeds you when you're hungry, clothes you when you're naked, entertains you when you're bored, etc. That man would be absurdly altruistic towards you. This is why economists generally use the assumption of rational self-interest. We sometimes fail to make the best decisions for ourselves, however we do things for ourselves more than we do things for others, and more than others do for us, so the assumption works most of the time. Compounding this is the fact that many social systems (the stock market, for example) select out those who fail to act in their rational self-interest. An investor who fails to make a profit ends up with less money to invest in the stock market, meaning that the assumption that stock markets consist of people acting in their rational self-interest is even stronger. Many, perhaps most social systems have this filtering effect to some degree, further justifying the rational self-interest assumption.

Liberty Is Property

2020-09-18T22:17:00.002-07:00

[there is a video version of this article here: https://youtu.be/7F2IksW3J9g]

Liberty and property are such closely related concepts that it makes some sense to say that they're the same thing. They are different sides of the same coin, if you will. Here's why.

What Liberty Is

Liberty is the absence of coercion. If you don't agree that this fully describes liberty, you probably will after I explain that I'm defining "coercion" very broadly. "Coercion" here is any time someone forces something upon you against your will.[1] This could take the form of a threat (I might threaten to punch you in the nose if you don't do what I want—that would be coercion) but it could also take a more direct form (I might actually punch you in the nose). The direct violence is coercion because you (presumably) do not want to have a broken nose, but I am forcing that upon you. The threat is coercion because I am threatening to force direct violence upon you in order to get you to do something you wouldn't otherwise do, so that take is being (by extension) forced upon you. Each of them, therefore, is a violation of your liberty.[2]

What Property Is

Property is the right to control an object. It's also known as ownership. If I "own" a piece of "property", that means I get to determine who gets to use it and for what. This can be understood from a behavioral perspective, a legal perspective, and from an ethical perspective.

From the behavioral perspective, what I own is simply that which I will defend more stubbornly than would otherwise be reasonable. That one probably requires more explanation.

In normal circumstances, in order to claim possession of a dollar bill, someone would probably be willing to give up an amount less than a dollar. This is reasonable for him to do because he will gain the difference between the value of the bill and what he spent to have it. However, if someone is willing to spend more than a dollar in order to have possession of that bill, this can not be justified in that way, and so requires additional explanation; why would he spend more than a dollar to ensure he has ownership of a specific dollar bill? One explanation is that he has designated that dollar bill as his property. If so, it makes sense that he'd be willing to give up more than a dollar to stop someone from stealing his dollar bill, because if he allows someone to steal it then others may realize that they can take whatever they want from him if they simply make it too costly for him to defend it. In this sense property is a strategy used to maintain access to some set of things that you believe you can defend with that strategy. From a behavioral perspective, to claim property rights over object is to attempt to communicate to others that, while they may be willing to take on some costs in order to take your object, you are willing to take on otherwise unreasonable costs in order to defend it. If this communication is successful then you will not actually need to take on these costs because other people will back down seeing that it's not worth it for them to try to take your property from you.

Then, there is the legal perspective. If the utility of these property rights is widely agreed upon, we may set up institutions specifically designed to help protect those property rights. In order to do so, these institutions will need to have definitions of who owns what. That set of definitions is called the law, and property, from the legal perspective, is simply what you own according to it.

Finally, there is the ethical perspective. From this perspective, that which you own is simply that which it is wrong to take from you. This one probably doesn't require further explanation.

You can probably see how these three perspectives of property rights come together. Property rights are a behavioral strategy which we codify into systems of law and into systems of ethics. What might not be so clear is how this all comes back to liberty.

How Liberty & Property Are Connected

Let's return to our simple definition of liberty; "absence of coercion." Remember that one example of coercion was me punching you in the nose. Now forget that one again, because it's too easy. Let's instead consider whether me eating an apple is coercion. If I eat the apple, you can no longer eat it. Am I forcibly taking away your ability to eat the apple, or am I simply exercising my liberty to eat an apple if I so wish?

The answer, of course, depends on whose apple it is. If it is my apple, I'm just exercising my liberty. If it's your apple, then I'm forcibly depriving you of your right to eat your own god-damned apple. If we ignore this distinction, and throw out any concept of property, then liberty would be an impossible standard to apply. Would apple-eating be an act of liberty or an act of coercion? Yes! It'd be liberty to the apple-eater and coercion to everyone else. It'd be impossible to say whether, to maximize liberty, we should prevent me from eating the apple or prevent you from preventing me!

In fact, in the absence of property rights, any act at all will create this conundrum. To make use of anything in any way is to prevent others from doing quite the same. We can both drink from the same stream, but we cant drink the same mouthful in the same spot at the same time.

So unless you want to say that every act is coercive (rendering coercion and liberty useless) there must be some class of objects in the world that you can use without it being considered coercive to everyone else. That class of objects we call your property.

I don't think I'm redefining concepts just to make them useful here, either (though that is a worthwhile thing to do sometimes). This actually seems to be how we often consider the concept of liberty intuitively. Consider our example about the punching of a nose. It is obvious that me punching your nose is coercive, but would it be obvious that it isn't coercive if it was me punching my own nose. It's from here we get the phrase "your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose". It's the fact that it's my nose—the nose that I own—that makes the difference.

I don't know if I need to explain why it makes sense for you to be the owner of the nose attached to your face, while I'm the owner of the nose attached to mine (perhaps I'll do so some other time) but for now, I'm just making clear that liberty, to be useful as a concept, requires property. If the concept of coercion is to have any meaning, it must refer only to force used with respect to what someone else owns. If the conception of liberty is to have any meaning, it must refer only to the liberty to freely use your own property.

However, the initial claim I made was a little stronger than that, wasn't it? I said that it makes some sense to say that liberty and property are the same thing. In defense of that, let's consider what it means for liberty to be absolute, and what it means for property rights to be absolute. What that would mean is that only I get to determine what is done with my property—nobody else. I know I didn't say whether I was just describing absolute liberty or absolute property rights, that's the point.

What this all comes down to is this: Liberty is the right to do what you will with what is yours. Anything beyond that is doing what you will with what is not yours, which is not liberty, but tyranny.

[1]

You might prefer to call this "force or coercion" instead of just grouping it all under "coercion". If so, feel free to imagine that every instance of "coercion" in this piece was replaced by "force or coercion" and the argument should stand.

[2]

Perhaps you would prefer to define liberty as freedom from any physical impediment. You can define words however you want, but I submit that a better word from that would simply be capacity, or ability, since you're just describing what people are physically capable of doing. To define liberty this way would mean that if I'm physically unable to fly then I do not have the liberty to fly. This definition runs counter to how people usually talk about liberty. If someone claimed that he is being deprived of his liberty to fly we would tell him that no, he's perfectly free to fly if he wants to try, nobody's going to stop him, he's just lacking the physical capacity to do so successfully. In this example, at least, it seems that we implicitly consider liberty with the definition I outlined: the absence of coercion. In other words, in absence of the impediments placed on us by other people as opposed to the impediments placed on us by the laws of physics.

Not only is this definition more in line with our intuitive usage of the word liberty than the alternative, it's also more useful because it makes an important distinction that deserves its own word. If we don't use the word liberty to mean free from coercion, we'd just have to make up a new word that does mean that.

Against Equality (Yes, Even That Kind)

2020-08-30T21:13:00.014-07:00

Video version of this article here: https://youtu.be/USzFwIjafoU

[image source: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-10684399]

Almost everyone talks about "equality" as though it is an obviously good thing, but to me equality seems at best neutral and at worst dangerous. "Equal" means "the same". If I say 2+2=4 I'm saying that having two sets of two things is the same as having four things. Similarly, to say that people are equal is to say that they're the same. Do you really want to live in a world in which everyone is identical?

Now, you'd probably say that when you talk about equality you don't mean it quite that literally, but it's not clear at all what people do mean by it. So, what I'll be doing today is going through four possible definitions of equality that people might support, and I'll be explaining why none are worth supporting.

Actual Equality

Some say that believing in equality means you literally think that people are equal. But, of course, people differ in intelligence, preferences, strength, height, health, skills, etc. They differ individual to individual and group to group. As the great Thomas Sowell puts it: “Nobody is equal to anybody. Even the same man is not equal to himself on different days.”

A common response when I point this out is "but people are only different because of oppression!" Which, to start with, is wrong. There are a whole host of reasons people can differ that aren't oppressive, including (but not limited to) upbringing, place of birth, genetics, or just plain luck—just because one person has been luckier than another doesn't mean the luckier person is oppressing the less lucky one—but either way, it's beside the point. The fact remains that people are different.

Whatever the cause of the inequality, any suggestion of actual equality of people is simply a false claim about reality.

Equality Of Outcome

An alternative could be that when you say you believe in equality you don't mean that people are equal, rather you just mean that people ought to be equal... but in what way is equality a good thing? Presumably nobody actually wants people to all be identical clones of one-another. Instead, perhaps what is meant is that we all ought to be equally well off.

Let's take a simple example to see whether you really think this kind of equality is a good thing. Consider two men; one rich, one poor. How much of the rich man's wealth would you be willing to destroy in order to lessen that inequality? I'm guessing most people's answer is "none."

I'm not asking how much would you want to steal from the rich man and give to the poor man, mind you. I'm asking how much of the rich man's wealth would you be willing to destroy. If you are willing to steal from the rich man and give to the poor man, you may just think the poor man would value that wealth more than the rich man would; possibly because you think the rich man has so much he won't notice a small percentage of his wealth gone, but the poor man would certainly notice the large percentage increase to his.

What you're doing there is just trying to maximize total value for all involved, which is not the same as valuing equality. If you really think that equality itself is a good thing, you must be willing to give up some cost in terms of total value to reduce inequality, which is accomplished by destroying some of the rich man's wealth. If you are not willing to give up even a small amount of total value in order to reduce inequality in what sense can you really claim to value equality? When I see that someone is not willing to pay any cost for something, I say that person does not value that thing.

Alternatively, consider yourself deciding which of two friends to give a spare concert ticket to. It's true that the relative wealth of the two people you're considering may play some role in determining who gets it, but more important, will be the relative preferences of the two people. If it's a ticket to the wealthier friend's favorite band, while the other friend thinks that band is merely okay, you might decide it's better to give the wealthier friend the ticket, even though that will increase inequality!

Again, the important thing seems to be maximizing total value, not equalizing value. It's only our tendency to value stuff less the more of it we have that sometimes makes equality seem like it's a good thing. That tendency creates predictable situations in which equality and total value agree (you might consider our hypothetical about stealing from the rich and giving to the poor to be such an example). However, when we consider situations in which equality and total value disagree (our hypothetical about the concert ticket, for example), total value wins, therefore total value is what is actually important.

That said, even stealing from the rich to give to the poor in order to increase total value is a mistake. Consider the incredible improvements in the wealth of the average person over recent centuries.[1]

Ancient kings couldn't dream of the incredible bounty of exotic foods from all over the world now available to even the poorest among us in the local grocery store, or the fantastical electronic devices that global markets are even making available in the third world at this point. All this did not come from "redistribution"[2] of wealth, but from the creation of wealth. People started businesses and worked hard to find ways to increase production because they were able to get wealthy doing it, and in the process they made everyone wealthier. The extent to which you start "redistributing"[3] the profits away from those productive people, is the extent to which you destroy the very incentives that keep this glorious process going.

It's important to note that I'm making this argument with one hand tied behind my back: I'm ignoring any other potential moral issues with stealing. What I'm pointing out is that even if you think there is nothing inherently wrong with theft, wealth redistribution[4] in pursuit of equality ultimately reduces total value for everyone, and should still be opposed.

However, if you really value equality, none of that would convince you to stop supporting that theft. Maybe for you, it's worth it for everyone to become poorer, so long as the poor only become a little poorer while the rich become much poorer. At least then people would be more equal! If you are one of these people, you're probably too far gone for me to reach with this article. Yours is the ideology that results in ridiculous hiring quotas, where an organization will refuse to hire perfectly good applicants, merely because they are of a race that is "over-represented"; as though that matters. Yours is also the ideology that results in Pol Pot murdering everyone with reading glasses because people who can read seem like they might be upper class[5]. However, the majority, who aren't monsters, would probably say that I'm talking about "equality of outcome", whereas what they support is "equality of opportunity."

Equality Of Opportunity

Let me introduce you to Professor Adam Swift. Swift is someone who actually takes "equality of opportunity" seriously. To that end, he is very concerned about whether we need to stop parents from taking care of their own children too well, lest they give their children an unfair advantage above other children. The following quotes are from an interview with ABC[6]:

"What we realized we needed was a way of thinking about what it was we wanted to allow parents to do for their children, and what it was that we didn’t need to allow parents to do for their children, if allowing those activities would create unfairnesses for other people’s children."

As a result of this reasoning, Swift vehemently opposes parents' right to send their kids to a private school.

"Private schooling cannot be justified by appeal to these familial relationship goods,’ he says. ‘It’s just not the case that in order for a family to realize these intimate, loving, authoritative, affectionate, love-based relationships you need to be able to send your child to an elite private school."

He isn't as extreme as he could be, though. Despite the fact that it confers an "unfair advantage" upon your children, he will still allow you to read to them—although you should occasionally feel guilty for doing so.

"I don’t think parents reading their children bedtime stories should constantly have in their minds the way that they are unfairly disadvantaging other people’s children, but I think they should have that thought occasionally,"

It's worth noting here that reading to a child apparently has a larger effect on his future than sending him to a private school.

"‘The evidence shows that the difference between those who get bedtime stories and those who don’t—the difference in their life chances—is bigger than the difference between those who get elite private schooling and those that don’t,"

Remember, it is precisely because of this large benefit to your child, that you should feel guilty about reading to him. This is what even a moderate dedication to equality of opportunity actually looks like. If a child doesn't have parents who will read him bedtime stories, that is not something the child can get back. It's simply an opportunity he or she will never have.

To head off a possible objection at the pass here, if you'd say that the solution to this inequality should not be to prevent some parents from reading to their kids, but to give other children the opportunity to be read to, then recall the reasoning from our discussion of equality of outcome. If you would never say it's a good thing to reduce the net opportunities available to people in order to reduce inequality of opportunity, then your position is indistinguishable from someone who doesn't care at all about equality, but just wants people to be better off. To drive that home, let's say I do something nice to give an additional opportunity to a child who already has more opportunities than the average child. Assume this is at no cost to any other child. If you really believe in equality of opportunity you must be willing to say that I might have done something bad by improving a child's life.

In fact, all of the same reasoning from equality of outcome really applies here, because as a particular clever internet rabbit puts it: "Opportunity is just an outcome from a different reference point."[7]

Another objection to this I have heard is that the education and upbringing you are given somehow still doesn't count as opportunity. This is strange to me, because upbringing is a factor you have no control over that will affect whether you'll be considered for certain jobs. Isn't that a classic case of inequality of opportunity? Isn't that exactly how you'd describe the problem with basing your hiring decisions on race? It may be the case that compared to education, race is a less relevant factor to the ability to do a job, but that's sounding more like a defense of meritocracy than of equality.

Furthermore, even if you somehow make that leap from "equality of opportunity" to "meritocracy," it still seems like a hard thing to defend as a moral precept. The example that best drives that home is this: Is it okay for a father to hire his son at the family business? After all, that wouldn't be giving everyone an equal opportunity. That would be the employer hiring based on the employee's genetic connection to himself. Are you really willing to condemn the entire concept of a family business? Because if you're not, you don't really want equality of opportunity.

Equal Rights

Even those who see the problem with equality of opportunity, still usually fall back on "equality before the law" or "equal rights" as a last ditch effort to claim that they support equality. If this describes you, let me ask: do you support a world government? No? Then, do you believe that it is wrong for there to be any differences in the legal systems of different countries? No? Well then you don't believe in equal legal rights. Different governments with different legal systems will protect different rights and to different degrees, and the same government will treat different people differently depending on whether they're citizens.

However, what if, like me, you think the law should be privatized? Then you oppose the one world government and the national governments. You believe that the law between you and me should be a contract that our respective rights enforcement agencies sign.

This should deepen your opposition to equality of legal rights. Your and my rights enforcement agencies may have one contract with one another, while each may have different contracts with some third agency. Therefore the law between you and me is different from the law between you and him. You may believe there should be certain constants among those contracts. Perhaps they all should protect some basic property rights, for example. However, what determines the punishment you have the right to inflict on someone for certain violations? What exactly constitutes fraud? How bright does your neighbor's porch light have to be before it violates your property rights? These are all questions that may have multiple valid answers, and if you believe in a market for law, you believe that it is acceptable—nay—desirable that we have a multitude of competing and coexisting ways of drawing these lines.

Returning to the current governmental system, this is already true of international disputes. If you buy something from someone in another country, the laws governing that transaction will differ a little from the laws that would govern an otherwise identical transaction with someone in the same country.

One of the main reasons that I oppose the government, and one of the main reasons that most people oppose a one world government, is because we think that if there are multiple competing systems of law, which people have some ability to choose between, there will be a selection pressure on those legal systems in the direction of producing desirable laws. In the market system, that selection pressure is due to people switching companies to find the laws they want to live with, and in the national system it's due to people switching countries to do the same. Neither of these selection pressures could exist if everyone in the world had to have the same legal rights. In short, we believe that unequal systems of legal rights will result in better legal rights.

However, perhaps you believe that "equality before the law" doesn't mean that everyone in the world ought to have the same legal rights, perhaps you only think it means that the law should treat everyone under its jurisdiction the same. This, however is less equal rights, and more equal treatment, so it deserves its own entry.

Equal Treatment

I have even heard people say that equality means that we should treat people equally despite their differences. When you point out that sometimes the differences are relevant (for example, you should treat criminals differently from innocent people), they then add "well, unless the differences are relevant, of course." Which is the most pointless concept I've ever heard. Of course only relevant differences should change your treatment of someone. That's pretty much what relevant means! You may as well say you believe in the equality of objects because you treat all objects the same except for when it makes sense to treat them differently. Ridiculous.

If, in my section about equal rights, you were thinking "but equality before the law only requires that the law treats citizens the same," I submit that you are making this same mistake. The law treating citizens differently from foreigners is an inequality before the law, whether or not you consider it justified or not. The same goes for how the law gives different treatment to children and adults, people with criminal records and those without, or even guilty people and innocent people. If all you mean by "equality before the law" is that the law should treat people equally despite their differences unless the difference is relevant, then once again, you may as well be advocating the equality of all objects.

This doesn't mean that we should support everything that is usually opposed on the grounds of equality. Sometimes there are other arguments that lead to the same conclusion. Let's say you want to advocate against a company hiring based on the sex of the applicant. Rather than waffling out pointless tautologies about how you should treat everyone "equally" (with the asterisk of "except when you should treat them unequally"), try explaining why the sex of the applicant isn't relevant to the performance at this job, and why performance at the job is such an important factor to consider.

It's important to note that my alternative argument is not just a rewording of the "equality" argument. It's a change from a claim about what everyone "deserves" (allegedly, equal treatment) to a determination of what factors are useful to consider in a specific situation. The focus should be on what the job entails, why it's important that the job gets done well, and why the factor being used right now isn't useful to that end. It's a practical argument, not a moral one.

Now, my alternative argument wouldn't work if the man making the hiring decision simply preferred to work with people of a specific sex, and that preference for him outweighed the loss of efficiency caused by the sex-based hiring policy. In such a case, the answer is that the sex-based hiring policy is the correct one to take. If you disagree, feel free to provide your argument; but it'd better not rely on the premise that "we should treat people equally", because no, we shouldn't.

Conclusion

It's troubling that so many put so much effort into finding strange ways to be able to say they believe in equality. It's like they aren't sure what it means, but they know that our society has decided it's good; and so they do mental gymnastics to justify supporting it.

Many of you will right now be thinking that you have some other, subtler concept of equality that you support, but at this point I have to ask why you'd want to call it equality. Surely there is a better way of describing whatever you advocate for than a word that—if understood in the most straightforward of ways—is a defense of those who want you to feel guilty for reading to your kids, and even for those who want to kill anyone wealthy enough to afford reading glasses. Doing mental gymnastics to justify saying that you support equality is not a worthwhile pursuit. Even if you succeed, all you will accomplish is to provide cover for those who have a much more sinister, yet much clearer idea of what that word means.

So let us say what we mean. People are not equal, and there is no virtue in trying to make them that way. Instead of working to equalize the world, let's just work on improving it.

By Danny Duchamp

[1]

Data for GDP per capita chart: https://delong.typepad.com/print/20061012_LRWGDP.pdf

[2]

theft

[3]

stealing

[4]

even without the scare-quotes it's still theft

[5]

Pol Pot killing the bespectacled: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-10684399—Whether or not you think that their belief in equality was really their motivation here, the point stands that equality, if applied consistently, is a defense of these killings.

[6]

Professor Adam Swift speaking to ABC: https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/philosopherszone/new-family-values/6437058

[7]

You should follow Bones the Rabbit (BTRBT_) on Twitter: https://twitter.com/BTRBT_/status/1292347851079467021